Breakpoint: The Holocaust and the Reality of Evil

 By John Stonestreet and Timothy D. Padgett

Published January 27, 2025

For the disbelieving youth, remembrance is more important than ever.

Eighty years ago, on January 27, 1945, Soviet forces overran a section of German-occupied Poland. The Nazis had been on the run for a couple of years by this point near the end of World War II, so it was not the retreat that shocked the Soviets. In the neighborhood of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Soviets discovered 600 corpses and 7000 live, emaciated prisoners. It was only the beginning of the discovery of the horrors of the Holocaust, a word now used as a synonym for evil.

In 12 years of Nazi power, and particularly after the 1942 start of the “Final Solution,” some six million Jews, along with five million Slavs, Roma, dissidents, and other prisoners, were worked, shot, or gassed to death. The bulk were taken from modern day Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine, but Hitler’s odious apparatus netted victims from across Europe, sometimes with complicity of local governments. The Nazis claimed that the Jews were being resettled in newly conquered areas of the USSR, but they were instead systematically executed. Those who could work were worked to death. Those who couldn’t work, including children and the elderly, were killed with all the industrial genius of the German nation.

What should be a source of shock for today is the increasing number of young Americans who doubt that the Holocaust, one of the most well-attested events in all history, even happened. The records are there, as were a number of eyewitnesses. The Nazis said they were going to do it, and Germans today admit they did. This evil happened.

This is why Holocaust Remembrance Day is important to note and observe, especially with the next generation. It is a historical marker that forces us to face the reality and potential of evil. Especially in a culture like ours, which too often caricatures evil, we must not downplay the potential of humanity to commit evils after the Fall.  

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